The Epicurean Edge: Japanese and European professional chefs knives
This Mac was recommended to me by several chefs and I love it, it's got an interesting wavy edge that doesn't tear the bread, cuts really soft loaves or hard crusts and doubles as a slicer for meats.
Jannie

I've just got to gush a bit here, sometimes the littlest things can excite me. Last night I walked into one of my favorite cooking stores and asked about peelers. Among the few she recommended was one from CIA. I have a bunch of their other utensils and this thing feels just wonderful in my hand, it doesn't hurt that it looks really great and everything I've bought from CIA has been excellent. For ten dollars it was worth the gamble.
OMG it's fantastic, how is it possible...

How can I possibly be alive, I have used a wood cutting board just about every day of my adult life, I never treated it at all with the exception of using a wet sponge, or a wet sponge with dish detergent until probably the last ten years when I started using pharmacy grade mineral oil. To date I've never had a problem, never gotten sick. How can this be?
Now I'm crazy clean, terrified to tears of raw chicken, pork and beef, almost to the point of stopping eating them...

Yeah the handle is huge and I feel like it makes things less precise. I did try peeling a nectarine and it worked fine but I still don't like it much, funny but I've never said that about any peeler before. I'll keep looking for something better or just go back to my Henkels.
Jannie

Yeah the handle is huge and I feel like it makes things less precise. I did try peeling a nectarine and it worked fine but I still don't like it much, funny but I've never said that about any peeler before. I'll keep looking for something better or just go back to my Henkels.
Jannie

Okay I took it back and exchanged it for another, it works twice as good but I'm not thrilled with it at all, not as much as some others I've tried over at friends. I'll keep using it to give it a fair chance, I could be over critical at the moment but thanks for encouraging me to take it back, normally I hate to do that sort of thing.
Jannie

I have only within the last six months become a fan of the Japanese knives. You can get a Wustof or Henkels (German) extremely sharp but nothing like one of the Japanese knives I have...too sharp if you have kids in the house. On mine if you touch the blade, you've probably cut yourself.
The down side with the Japanese knives is that they are wonderfully thin, but that also means that many of them cannot be used on deboning a chicken or a very hard squash shell, the...

Such an inexpensive yet imortant tool. Yesterday I bought an OXO on the recommendation of Cooks Illustrated to replace my little Henkels which I somehow lost. This thing is junk, I tried to peel an English cucumber, potatos and asparagus stems and it either wouln't cut or would clog/jam.
So 9 dollars wasted, I angrily threw it in the garbage can...arrrrrgh.
What do you people who cook for a living use?
Jannie:(